I'm Not Scared, by Niccolò Amminiti (Canongate, £6.99)
"When you grow up you must go away from here and never come back," whispers nine-year-old Michele's Mama into his ear in the scorching summer of 1978. It's advice that the narrator of Amminiti's cinematic third novel (the first published here, and a dark, twisted parable to be swallowed whole in Jonathan Hunt's taut translation) appears to have heeded. Twenty-two years on, Michele has lived to tell the tale of his horrifying discovery in a disused farmhouse. An encounter with the kidnapped son of a Lombard businessman - the semi-feral Filippo (Kaspar Hauser overtones) who babbles about angels and dead people in holes - is hallucinatory enough. But finding out who's behind the kidnapping is far, far worse. The timeframe risks blunting the narrative, but it's the stifling sexual tension and gnawing economic frustration of the grown-ups, blistered by heat and orthodoxy, that etches this rites-of-passage thriller on to your brain. SA

One Day, by Ardashir Vakil (Penguin, £7.99)
Twenty-four chapters mapping 24 hours in the endangered marriage of Ben Tennyson, teacher and fusion-food critic manqué, and Priya Patnaik, a radio journalist. On the eve of their son Whacka's third birthday, Priya is masturbating next to Ben, who's looking for a return to form by reading The Inner Game of Tennis. Whacka, you see, is not entirely theirs. Like its title, One Day is stranded between the symbolic and the mundane. This follow-up to the much-lauded Beach Boy veers from arresting style ("Whacka ... lay splayed on the milky crucifix of his dreams") to the prosaic self-indulgence it part apes, part decries: "Whingeing double-income liberal parents, please let us have no more of their banal utterances." Vakil handles the worm of decay with intelligent compassion, as the couple smashes against "the potential space up to which a relationship can float". But just as Vakil's finale turns the Dublin snow of Joyce's "The Dead" into rain all over London, so his voice feels diluted. SA

The Portable Door, by Tom Holt (Orbit, £6.99)
"It's sort of like The Office - only with added goblins and dragons", goes the blurb. The latest from the humorous fantasy writer involves Paul Carpenter, new employee of JW Wells & Co, discovering that matters are most peculiarly awry in his sinister workplace (and beyond). Why has an Arthurian sword-in-a-stone appeared in his bedroom? What about the four-pointed claw-marks and red reptilian eyes he keeps snatching glimpses of? And just how far can that nifty Acme Portable Door (rolls up into a tube; think pocket-sized Narnia wardrobe) transport him when he flattens it out and steps through it? Well, far enough to grab a latte in Milan or climb the Great Wall of China in his lunch break, for starters. The humour is endlessly self-effacing: "Paul had long since got used to the fact that he was the most forgettable person in the world since What's-his-name." The fantasy is given a corporate makeover, but this yarn about getting the girl is ingenious enough. SA

Heaven Forbid, by Christopher Hope (Picador, £7.99)
Martin Donally is six, and king of his own Johannesburg front garden. He has a feathered cap in homage to Robin Hood and a mouthful of strange vocabulary his grandfather has taught him. "Denuded", "desiccated" and "discombobulated" are his favourite words, though he doesn't know what they mean. Nor does he realise that the man next door is Dr Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid. Martin's idyll is shattered by the appearance of a new stepfather, an unreconstructed racist whose brutal intrusion mirrors the greater breakdown of South African society. Few authors can write from a child's perspective with true conviction, yet Hope achieves a fine balance between blunt observation and naive poetry. He describes a typical Johannesburg street riot as "all perfectly normal"; yet delicately captures the way in which "the sun lay down in the water, and pulled the water over itself like a sheet". Denudedly, desiccatedly, discombobulatingly good. AH

White Lies, by Dexter Petley (Fourth Estate, £7.99)
Norman is one of life's drifters, the kind of guy you find slouching from one backpacker locus to another, waiting five days for the bus to Zambia "or five hours for rice and beans in the New World Eating Bar in Wethefuckarwe". But when he sees a magazine profile of a beautiful young missionary, he suspects the time has come to settle down. All he has to do is find her. Dexter Petley's novel is a finely nuanced analysis of a relationship based on preconception and doomed to failure. "If anything," says Norman, "it was a meeting between one young man who'd found nothing to believe in and a young woman about to demolish everything she'd ever believed in." Their relocation to a French farmhouse is pregnant with symbolism and self-inflicted disaster, while the evocation of the charnel house of Ugandan politics is blisteringly sardonic. Just occasionally the narrative seems as prone to wander off course as its hero, but it's lucid enough to put you off the idea of backpacking or renovating a nice little gîte for good. AH

A Stone Boat, by Andrew Solomon (Vintage, £6.99)
Harry is a blithely successful international concert pianist who has his favourite seat on every plane, his favourite spot by every baggage-claim carousel, "but no longer a favourite country". He keeps his family at arm's length and his homosexuality in the closet, but all that alters with the discovery that his mother is dying. Solomon's narrative is an extended diminuendo whose fastidious style often veers the wrong side of affectation. I'd love to know what kind of postal district "the neighbourhood of pause" belongs to, while the subject of flowers provokes some especially prissy rhapsodising: "that tight bud of a peony is like the clown car at heaven's circus, the petals, then the smiling faces that pour like infinity into the ring". Solomon also has a bizarre grasp of the way people speak. Harry's friends say such things as: "Sometimes I look at you and I think it's as though you'd chosen a boat carved from diamond ... but it's a stone boat." It's top-heavy metaphors like this that ultimately sink the novel. AH

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